A NATION CHALLENGED: HOLLYWOOD; Terrorist From Central Casting Has Hard Lessons to Teach

It could be the heavy beard. Or the accent evocative of an afternoon in a souk. Maybe it's his size, large enough to crush the average flight attendant.

Or perhaps because he can successfully convince an audience he will blow your head off, Sayed Badreya has made it in Hollywood by being cast in one role after another as an Islamic terrorist.

''Here, I am hijacking a T.W.A.,'' he said in his thick accent, hitting the play button on a video reel of his film clips in his Santa Monica apartment. ''Here, I am Hezbollah.'' Fast forward. ''This one, I am kidnapper.''

He is not as famous as his old roommate, Woody Harrelson, or his buddies from his starving-actor days, Peter and Bobby Farrelly, who recently cast him against type as a doctor in ''Shallow Hal.'' But he has done pretty well for the son of a street sweeper who first dreamed of being a movie star watching John Wayne and ''Spartacus'' in the theaters of Port Said, Egypt.

Now, thanks to roles in movies like ''Independence Day,'' ''Three Kings'' and ''The Insider,'' he has an S.U.V., and a son and a daughter watching ''Rugrats'' in his living room snuggled next to his wife, Patricia, a nurse from Sandusky, Ohio.

Until nine years ago, the only terrorists Mr. Badreya had met were some guys with prop guns on a movie set. Then, he says, he decided to ''do the De Niro thing'' and immerse himself in the world of the people he was pretending to be -- radical Islamic fundamentalists.

''I wanted to find out how to speak like them, how they eat, how they think,'' he said. He was drawn in by the religious talk, the hours studying scripture, the tight community. ''And I fell in love with it.''

But over time, what he saw frightened him. Now Mr. Badreya is using everything he absorbed from that experience to make a documentary film to warn about recruitment efforts by Muslim militants on American soil.

He said his goal was to protect his children and his wife -- and his adopted country, which once welcomed penniless young dreamers like him from the Middle East.

''I love this country because I didn't always have it,'' he said over dinner, eyes flashing. ''Freedom, food, water that is clean, Constitution -- these are not things I take for granted.''

In 1992, when Mr. Badreya started his research, he did not have to travel back to Egypt. He just left his apartment in Santa Monica and began worshiping with a community of Muslims who met in a converted mini-mart in nearby Culver City. He prayed with them. He studied with them. He ate on the floor with them.

''We were like a family, like a gang,'' he said. Soon he was there full time, building up a library for the little mosque. He insisted that Patricia, who had converted to Islam when they married, cover her head when she went out.

The director Bobby Farrelly recalled chatting with a cabdriver a few years ago who mentioned he was from Egypt. ''I said to him, I have a friend who is Egyptian -- Sayed, Sayed Badreya. And he turned around and said, 'Sheik Sayed? He is a scholar, he is a high cleric in our mosque.' And I said, 'No, not that Sayed. He's funny. He laughs.' And the cabby said, 'Yeah, he's an actor.' I couldn't believe my ears,'' Mr. Farrelly said. ''I never knew he was so spiritual.''

The men in the mosque were not terrorists, Mr. Badreya said. They were conservative Muslims -- salafis and wahhabis, who followed the strict strain of Islam taught in Saudi Arabia.

But they were receptive, Mr. Badreya said, when the sheiks he calls jihadis gave talks at the mosque and at others in Los Angeles and San Diego in which they preached holy war. They were looking for recruits and raising money for ''freedom fighters'' in Afghanistan. A man who said he frequented the mosque during this period confirmed Mr. Badreya's account.

In 1993, the mosque had a visit from Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who, soon after, was arrested and later convicted in the plot to blow up New York City landmarks. Mr. Badreya said he was there when the sheik gave a scholarly, moderate talk in the early evening. He then tagged along as the sheik was hustled into a car, taken to an apartment, changed clothes, changed cars and then was driven in a circuitous route to a dormitory in a community college in Hawthorne where, in the middle of the night, he preached for two hours about jihad to a rapt circle of young men.

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Then in 1996, Mr. Badreya said, a man he had never seen before was outside the mosque one day passing out cassette tapes of a lecture by Osama bin Laden.

''Listen to this,'' Mr. Badreya said, driving the San Diego Freeway and popping in a cassette. It was a forceful monotone, every word echoing, and Mr. Badreya translated what he claimed were the words of Osama bin Laden.

''Kill them. Kill the crusaders. He is saying that the world is stepping on the neck of the Muslim people and dishonoring us,'' said Mr. Badreya, paraphrasing. ''God smiles on the martyrs. When a martyr dies he doesn't feel pain, and 70 people in his family will get into heaven because of him.''

''Wow. It's magnificent,'' said Mr. Badreya, admiring the performance. ''He is so down to earth. He is reciting poems he wrote. He is reciting from the Koran. It's a great recruitment tape.''

Mr. Badreya said he saw the tape mesmerize listeners, particularly idealistic young Muslims, many of them new immigrants feeling isolated and alienated in America.

''I wasn't so isolated to become a freedom fighter,'' he said. ''But if it was five years before and I was 22, maybe I would be in Afghanistan too.''

Mr. Badreya no longer worships at the mosque where he tended the library. Some members drove him out in 1996 after the release of the film ''Executive Decision.'' He played a Palestinian who hijacked a plane headed for Washington loaded with enough nerve gas to depopulate the East Coast. At the mosque -- which has since disbanded -- some of the men Mr. Badreya considered his family called him a traitor for taking on the role. He says they would have come to blows if friends had not stepped in.

The drive on the San Diego Freeway ends in Anaheim, and Mr. Badreya parks at a strip mall where the storefronts include an Arabic travel agency and a restaurant. At the buffet, he greets a contact who goes by the alias Abu-Anas.

Abu-Anas is unsmiling, with pocked cheeks. They settle in over full plates to break the Ramadan fast. For his documentary, Mr. Badreya is interviewing Abu-Anas, who claims he was once the right-hand man of Sheik Rahman. Now, refusing to go into detail, Abu-Anas saysthat he talks to the F.B.I.

''They come to the U.S.,'' said Abu-Anas of the itinerant jihadis who passed through before Sept. 11, ''deliver the message and disappear. They are brainwashing.''

''So how can we stop them?'' Mr. Badreya asked. ''We need the scholars.''

They bat around the names of Saudi sheiks who would have enough influence with the militants to speak out against Mr. bin Laden. But some of these sheiks have already issued fatwas encouraging Muslims to fight Americans. The two men scoff at the White House for paying an American advertising executive to concoct a campaign to convince the Muslim world to love America. And they are seething about the detentions and questioning of Middle Easterners.

''America, do something to make me love you,'' Abu-Anas said. ''Every day you do something to make me hate you.''

Mr. Badreya said he feared that in the long fight against terrorism, the United States was not equipped for the necessary theological combat.

''It's not about fences and laws,'' he said. ''It's about heaven.''

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A version of this article appears in print on December 12, 2001, on Page B00008 of the National edition with the headline: A NATION CHALLENGED: HOLLYWOOD; Terrorist From Central Casting Has Hard Lessons to Teach. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe